How is this even possible? In a daze maybe? Spaced out? High? She was clearly incoherent, but she wasn’t sleeping. She was found in her driveway. That means she was making turns, speeding up, braking, etc. She was sending texts. Stupid, but not asleep.

The design of this is wildly impractical for a post-apocalyptic world, but if I survive the robot uprising, the zombie apocalypse, and the nuclear winter, this is the kind of vehicle I want. Not the Volvo Wagon, but something that has an enormous/efficient solar array to charge itself, then folds up when on the move. Take the solar pavilion and put it on an electric, water-proof Wrangler Rubicon for example. That’s your apocalyptic getaway car.

This is the second time I’ve written this post. The first time, I started to go into a huge explanation so that everyone could understand this idea before realizing that anyone who didn’t already understand the issues had a 0% chance of caring about the idea anyway. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then this post is not for you.

With all the hype/concern/backlash/misinformation-fueled legislation in the world around cookies and their use in the browser, I think it’s only a matter of time before analytics and ad tech are going to have to figure out a non-cookie dependent solution for measuring web usage and delivering relevant ads to interested consumers.

It’s really a value proposition problem. The consumer doesn’t see the value of sharing data, and rather than showing them the value, corporations have essentially tried to figure out ways to collect the consumer’s data anyway, just without letting them know about it.

So here’s the straightforward and transparent plan:

Convince a group of consumers to maintain a profile with accurate demographic & behavioral information

Have the group create a list of things/categories they’re interested in seeing ads/offers for

Find a group of product makers who will divert some of their ridiculous marketing budgets into discounts

Play matchmaker between the interested consumers and the products being offered by product makers

Sell the product to the interested consumer at a discount

The consumer gets a great deal on the thing they already want/need. The product maker sells the thing that they wanted to sell to an interested person and didn’t waste money telling 1M people at $10CPM that didn’t care about the thing they were selling. An ongoing relationship is formed between the consumer and the product maker that provides value to both parties.

As long as the consumer remains interested in the category (as determined by their up to date profile), the product maker is free to continue to make offers to the consumer at the same discounted rate or normal pricing. There would obviously be a pricing strategy – which I know nothing about – that would determine their ultimate offers to repeat customers.

Everyone makes informed decisions, no one is tricked, and no regulated/illegal cookies are involved in the mutually beneficial transaction.

Often times, I sit down in the evening and wonder what I should watch. I have a Netflix subscription, I can buy stuff Video on Demand from Amazon or from Apple. Of course there’s access to Hulu and none of those is good enough, you can try Vudu or Crackle. Or maybe I just want to watch something that I already own. But I want to watch something funny with George Clooney in it. Or maybe I I’m in the mood for an action movie with Angelina Jolie or that guy that plays Captain America. I want to watch it in HD and I want to stream it, because I’m not waiting for the disc in the mail.

Does Netflix have something I want? Is it available for streaming? Can’t find anything on Netflix (can anyone?), so let me go look at Apple. Or Amazon. Can I rent it? Can I buy it? Is it availble in HD? Which one is cheaper? By the time you’ve gone through all this, sometimes I’ve just decided it’s not worth the trouble. So here’s the idea. A single site where I can punch in a title or an actor, and it will search all of these places for me. I can filter the results down by streaming, by rent or buy, by HD quality, by price, by genre, by just about anything I want.

And then I can click a link and go buy/rent/stream whatever I decided on.